The Indian city of Mumbai hopes to fight terrorism by installing keyloggers

All Internet cafes in the Indian city of Mumbai will have police-sanctioned key-logger software installed on their machines to help combat terrorism. With a population of 13 million residents, cafe owners only in the city of Mumbai will be forced to install the software.

All cafe owners will be forced to register and receive a city license from police headquarters, reveal the number of PCs located in the location and Internet protocol (IP) addresses for all of the PCs. Any cafe owners who do not register can be fined, with harsher punishments possible.

The announcement follows bombings in Hyderabad and Mumbai that were reportedly organized in Internet cafes.

"The police needs to install programs that will capture every key stroke at regular interval screen shots, which will be sent back to a server that will log all the data," said Vijay Mukhi, India Foundation for Information Security and Technology president. "The police can then keep track of all communication between terrorists no matter which part of the world they operate from. This is the only way to patrol the net and this is how the police informer is going to look in the e-age," he added.

Privacy experts and bloggers around the world point out different methods criminals can use to remain anonymous. A CNET blog indicates the use of proxy servers and Tor could be two potentially popular methods to get around the keyloggers.

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